Ross Hawkins

A day or so ago someone (thanks Blair!) pointed out that this site wasn’t being too friendly to mobile visitors – in fact, it was displaying a 404 to every mobile visitor. Ouch. This happened before and I fixed it, however I didn’t fix it in a completely sustainable way. However “fixing it” again still meant that the site was still serving up the same 6+ year old design to all visitors, and it really wasn’t a pleasant experience on mobile devices. So I’ve just taken the time to do a very quick skin update to something...

In the past I’ve been very much a stream of consciousness writer. That is to say, an idea will pop into my head or something will happen and I’ll sit down and write about it then and there, and post it when finished (after a quick proof read). This has a couple of implications – if I’m too busy to write when that something happens then I often forget to write about it. I’ll often make notes and points along the lines of “Hey, I should write about that”, but often find it hard to come back and get...

The observant among you will notice that the site has changed. I'm no longer running on Domino, and hence I'm no longer running on Blogo. The site is now fully powered by ASP.NET, and is running the excellent Open Source Subtext. Thanks go out to Ferdy for all the time he's spent writing and maintaining Blogo - if you're in the market for an open source Domino blogging engine then check it out, it's well worth it.
Why Subtext? I can't really say. I played with a few .NET solutions out there, and decided that I really liked quite a few...

Most of the time on this site I write about coding, or moan about trains, but there's more to me than that - sometimes I like to play with hardware too!
That's not entirely true. No one likes to play with hardware, but they do generally like the results as long as all goes well. This week promises to be a bit of a hardware/networking week. I've just ripped out my twin SLI'ed 7800 GTs to replace them with a single Asus GeForce 8800 GTS, 320MB, DDR3, PCIe-16, TV out, DVI, HDTV, SLI ready etc. It's...

The last couple of months have been pretty busy, and the updates to this site have suffered as a result of that. When I'm not working I'm in the middle of migrating all of my personal data (including this site) off Domino. I've got most of the work done towards migrating over to SubText, but I'm having trouble finalising a site design. The fact that I'm pretty average when it comes to designing layouts is a bit of a hindrance. I'm finding SubText pretty nice to work with from a skinning perspective - however I'm pretty easily sold...

About me

My name is Ross Hawkins and I'm a developer, consultant, business owner and writer based in Auckland,
New Zealand. My current work revolves around ASP.NET, C#, Azure, jQuery, Ajax,
SQL Server, and a mix of other Microsoft development technologies. I also have about 15 years of experience with IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and associated technologies.

One of the breaking changes which was made with
the 1.0 release of the Microsoft Ajax Extensions was the renaming
of the 'Debug' class to 'Sys.Debug' for reasons of compatiability
with other frameworks. Breaking changes like this can often be a source of frustration..

A textbox character counter is a pretty simple piece of functionality, and there's a lot of different ways to apply one to your application. The following method is nice and simple, and can be done using only clientside JavaScript if required, or combined with server side code in order to create a more dynamic effect